This is the second in a five-day series. Read part one here.
Bridget Ziegler co-founded Moms for Liberty with the goal of transforming staid school board meetings into high-octane right-wing agitprop. So it's fitting that her comeuppance arrived in the form of being read for filth to her face at a Sarasota County School Board meeting by one of her many victims, gay former Florida public school student Zander Moricz, in a clip that went viral in mid-December
On top of founding the infamous pro-censorship group, Ziegler has been serving as a school board member, while also working closely with Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., to pass the notorious "don't say gay" law meant to put public school teachers and students back in the closet. She has also been busy with at least one same-sex encounter of her own, admitting to police that she had a three-way with another woman and her husband, Christian Ziegler, the chair of Florida's state Republican Party. Police are involved because the other woman has accused Christian Ziegler of raping her, in alleged retaliation after she declined to have sex with him without his wife present.
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Since there's no limit to Christian right hypocrisy, readers will not be surprised to hear that the couple who would ban books for others allegedly felt no shame about creating hardcore porn for themselves. Police reportedly recovered a video of Christian Ziegler and the accuser having sex. Now sources say police have a second video, of Bridget in bed with the unnamed woman. She was doing this while also terrorizing teachers in for advertising non-explicit LGBTQ-affirming events.
"You do not deserve to be removed from it for having a threesome," Moricz declared to Bridget Ziegler's face, in one of the most satisfying speeches of the year. "That defeats the lesson we’ve been trying to teach you, which is that a politician's job is to serve their community, not to police personal lives."
"Bridget, you deserve to be fired from your job because you are terrible at your job," he concluded. "Not because you had sex with a woman.”
A master class in going low to go high. Moricz managed to use Ziegler's sex life to humiliate her while making a larger point against using sex as a weapon against ordinary people. It was also a fitting obituary for Moms for Liberty, which may limp on for some time as an organization, but whose political power is disappearing along with Bridget Ziegler's ability to keep up the "chaste church lady" act.
It seems harder to believe today, but two years ago, Moms for Liberty was widely regarded as the great electoral hope of the Republican Party. The pro-censorship/anti-mask group was founded in Florida in January 2021 by far-right Republican activists, including Zielger, passing themselves off as mere "concerned mothers." The ostensible target was public schools, demonized for "woke" curricula and temporary public health measures to control the spread of COVID-19.
The real goal? Republican victories in state and national elections. The Moms targeted school board meetings in swing states, throwing tantrums over made-up threats like "critical race theory," which is just a scare term for teaching the histories of segregation and slavery. Or to scream about "groomers," a slur term authoritarians use to falsely imply LGBTQ teachers are sexual predators. The theatrics would garner local news coverage and social media play, creating the illusion that schools were out of control with "political correctness." The hope was to stir up a moral panic that would lead to swing districts electing Republicans, all the way up to the White House.
In November of 2021, Moms for Liberty scored big when Republican Glenn Youngkin won Virginia's gubernatorial race, running on a platform of annoyance over pandemic restrictions and fury that Black authors like Toni Morrison were being assigned in English class. This created a veritable mania in the GOP, which hoped that racist and homophobic panic, as well as lingering pandemic resentments, could be the key to winning over the mothers of school-age children, a group that has been trending left in the Donald Trump era. Moms for Liberty was lavished with money, attention, and acclaim, all in the hopes that their book-banning mania would be the key that unlocked future Republican victories.
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There was always good reason to be skeptical that the Moms were all they were cracked up to be. Post-election data showed that Youngkin did not actually get a surge of votes from parents angry about "woke" schools, but because elderly white people who were angry over Trump's loss turned out in large numbers, while other demographics, no doubt sick of politics, stayed home. Nor was there any evidence that the public had developed a sudden enthusiasm for censorship, as polls showed 83%-87% of voters opposed the Moms for Liberty-style book bans. Plus, common sense should have warned that they were wrong to believe Americans wished to continually relitigate the mask wars after the pandemic's end.
Sure enough, Moms for Liberty never made good on its promise to spin electoral gold out of culture war straw. The story of the past couple of years has been how much voters reject Christian right busybodies trying to control our sex lives, our reading material, and our right to ignore some unhinged church lady screaming about how the queers are trying to critically race theorize her precious white children. Moms-linked candidates who snuck onto school boards were voted out. Republicans underperformed in most elections. Instead, voters were driven by support for abortion rights, which stands in for a whole constellation of "mind your own business, Karen" attitudes in the public.
It's almost too good to be true that the already wounded organization would meet its end with a sex scandal. As most people who follow politics know, the Republicans out there making the biggest stink about the supposedly sinful sex lives of others tend to have overstuffed closets of illicit secrets themselves. No doubt there are still some liberals who are anxious about talking about the Zieglers' love of three ways, fearing it violates the principle of not using people's private sex lives as political weapons. But, as Moricz deftly illustrated, there is one loophole: When a person has built a career on shaming and policing the sex lives of private citizens, feel free to go ham when you discover there's video evidence that they love three ways.
Perhaps the lesson here is simple: Any Republican who wants to monitor our sex lives or reading habits must first hand their iPhone library over for public inspection. That would invite a blessed silence from the would-be arbiters of sexual morality.
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